The Reader

I don’t recall exactly when I heard about this movie for the first time, but I was interested from the word go. The story concerns a woman in her thirties who has an affair with a fifteen-year-old boy whom she meets quite by accident one day on her way home from work - but after a time she disappears, right from under his nose, and doesn’t turn up again until he happens upon her at the trial of six women for a crime perpetrated in the name of the Nazis. He is a law student studying the case. She is one of the defendants.

After I read the novel, back in early November, I was even more intrigued. The setup doesn’t give you much of an idea of the story - and none of the notion of its depth. In fact, the mere mention of a woman in her thirties taking up with a teenager is probably enough to scare away a lot of people - and that’s too bad, because those folks are missing out on a fine story that really gets to the heart of human emotion, and how the people experiencing those emotions deal with them.

That the material, particularly in the first act, is taboo, does not mean that we should shy away from it; rather the challenge should be embraced, the more so in the film version because of the courage required to step into the roles and bring them to life. There are dark impulses in the hearts of men, to be sure, but these impulses do not always whollly corrupt those plagued by them. Placing the story within the context of World War II allows lesser evil to be juxtaposed to Hitler, who was wholly corrupted by his dark impulses (and by his religion, but whatever).

Thus, it is the degree to which these impulses corrupt, and the actions and reactions that result, that are the foundations upon which an ultimately uplifting story can be built. To see such a story staged - or filmed - well deepens its impact and enhances its meaning. When we read, we internalize, seeing what we want to see - and refusing to see that which we cannot bear. Watching a story on film strips that subjectivity and leaves us exposed, which deepens the challenge of the material and makes the achievement of translation - when done well - all the more impressive.

We too often ignore or demonize that which we do not understand - witness the idiotic use by some of the appellation “B. Hussein Obama” during the recent election campaign - or which we have been taught to fear (once again, witness the idiotic use...); but difficult subjects make great art because they engage the thoughtful mind and challenge the everyday and mundane that we too often accept as life as we know it.

Kate Winslet is Hanna Schmitz, the older woman; and David Kross is the young version of Michael Berg. (He is played later in life by Ralph Fiennes.) Though it is neither loneliness nor desperation that brings these two together (it is, rather, that lovely and beguiling mistress fate - Michael falls ill on the way home from school one day and Hanna runs into him, almost literally, on her way home from work), it is clear, from establishing shots of Michael’s life at home and Hanna’s solitary life in a flat that can only be described as bleak, that there are emotional voids in the lives of both characters.

The device of an affair between two such souls, while inappropriate on its face, serves to illustrate the desperate lengths to which people will go to forge a self-sustatining connection with another perosn; and that the connection in this case involves sex further drives home the point that this connection is an innately human phenomenon. That this is perhaps not an ideal way for two people at such different stages of their lives to connect underpins the Nazi German setting. (Was there anything ideal about Germany in the 1940s, with the possible exception of the beer?)

Michael throws himself at Hanna, both literally and figuratively, casting his friends and classmates to the margins of his life - a place he occupies within his own family and with which he is familiar (we repeat the sins of our fathers). He has a passion for books, as so many lonely young people do, and he connects further with Hanna by reading to her. The reading and the sex are interwoven, and the bond that Michael feels as it forms and strengthens illustrates the danger in this kind of relationship - Hanna is clearly more important to Michael than she is to him.

Her disappearance rends his life asunder, but quietly. He goes to her flat one day to find simply that she is no longer there. The film transitions abruptly from this point to Michael’s college years, where he takes up the study of law and is unable to connect in any meaningful way with a female classmate who is obviously smitten with him. He sees Hanna again when his advanced law seminar attends the aforementioned trial of six women who joined the SS and later locked three hundred Jews in a church and let them burn to death.

The somewhat languid pace adds to the film’s running time, but serves to show how Michael’s emotions divide him; on the one hand, the woman he loved is in terrible trouble, but she is in terrible trouble for an unspeakable crime that she helped to commit - trying to work this out in one's head must surely be taxing. As the trial continues, it becomes a question of who took up leadership of the group of women, and Hanna is cornered into accepting blame for something that she did not do. While this transpires, Michael puts together a crucial piece of information about Hanna - one that could change the outcome of the trial, and of her fate - but does not reveal this information to anyone.

Much has been made of the guilt of Germans for the Holocaust, and this shame is on center stage during the trial; but what Michael knows turns that idea on its head by transferring the guilt of the Nazis onto someone who knows something that would be vaulable to the defense of a Nazi. Thus the question of whole corruption, and who is corrupted by whom, and by what. Even in such black and white cases like Nazi Germany, there are sometimes no easy answers. It is during the trial that Winslet’s enormous abilities are on full display. Her testimony is hardly forthcoming, mostly short responses to questions from the presiding judge, but it is clear in her carriage and tone that Hanna is not entirely sure what is going on - or else, she knows exactly what is going on and cares only for keeping safe the secret that is her cross to bear.

There aren’t exactly any twists and turns in The Reader - even the revelation of Hanna’s secret is not a bombshell. Instead, the weight of the story is in the effect that Hanna’s secret has had upon her life, and in the way that the viewer is forced to understand that even with moral relativism, there is nothing as it seems. The entire third act is falling action, scenes of active and passive absolution for Michael and for Hanna, and of resolution for both. Though the film does not precisely drag (it comes close), these scenes are mostly longer than they need to be - and the score is close to overpowering throughout most of the film. I don’t know that, put together, these two can stand only as minor quibbles, because they are distracting and they take away from the power of the story and the power of Winslet’s exceptional performance. The film as a whole, however, remains very, very good. If you are up to the challenge, this is a deeply satisfying film.